> I know there are some cool newcomers out there like zsh and fish, but after trying others out I always found that some of my utilities were missing or ill-replaced.
First of all bash was first released in 1989 and zsh arrived just 1 year later so zsh is in no way a newcomer.
Secondly zsh is almost strictly a bash superset so I don't know what he was missing (or what he found "ill-replaced").
I would have to run zsh again to remember the pieces that I didn't like. I might have been able to configure my way around it, but I do remember things not working as I expected them to.
zsh has always been held back by the "default browser"-syndrome: Linux and Mac OS both come with "good enough" default shells, so few people actually want to go through the effort of switching.
Especially since there is a bit of a learning curve to becoming more productive with zsh than you already are with bash.
It's one reason to keep one's environment relatively standard and boring. Otherwise, one comes to be dependent -- psychologically, at least -- on one's meticulously configured custom environment, and either chafes at its absence elsewhere or spends a great deal of time copying it everywhere.
Bash and zsh only differ in some of their more advanced features, which I rarely use or miss on machines I ssh in to -- unless I spend most of my time on those remote machines, in which case I'll just install zsh there too. The main thing from zsh that I do miss on bash is advanced globbing, which is more convenient than the find command, but when I'm forced to use bash I'll just use find, and it's really no big deal.
So I encourage you not to let the fact that most machines have bash installed on them deter you from switching to zsh, if you're interested in zsh. I know I regret the years lost that I didn't use zsh myself.
IIRC debian provides a checkbashisms to know which scripts will pose problems when ran against /bin/sh
Anyways. The core point is that compatibility often means compatible in 90%-99% of the cases. It's really really hard to be 100% compatible, which also requires one to emulate bugs etc.
I like to come up with one-liners when doing stuff as a challenge and not being able to do a for-loop as a single line drove me nuts (keeping it one line is really useful when you're iterating over a command and using history). I also find subshells very handy in bash.
It requires some work to build zsh settings to one's personal preferences but once done you are at home. Alternatively you can use one of the many settings you can find around, it is faster and simpler but now you're living in someone else' home.
On the other hand, if you look at the whole widgets section, I'm pretty sure you could hack it yourself since zsh supports used defined widgets (widgets are basically functions used by the zsh command editor).
I never said that it's easy, just that zsh is basically a bash superset. However that does mean that in some occasions this means that you want a Prius and instead get a Ford Mustang kit that you have to assemble yourself :D
bindkey '^]' vi-find-next-char